parallels

"How do we know if a book is holy? If it defiles the hands." The sacrality of texts, which determines their canonical status in the Talmud, is gauged by the extent to which they violate the one who comes into contact with them. A book is sacred only if it defiles you. Seek out those books that leave you ravaged. (Scribbler)


I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy? Good lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief. (Kafka)

Stared into the sunken
deathless eyes of God:
two wells of impenetrable
black, a blackness
without reflection

Felt the stink of the void
on God's wheezing breath
before erupting into laughter -
And my scream is still gnawing
at the foundations of the world

Rumi

Do you think I know what I'm doing?
That for one breath or half-breath I belong to myself?
As much as a pen knows what it's writing
or the ball can guess where it's going next.
*
Be melting snow, wash yourself of yourself
Become Oceanic
*
The mother and father are your attachment
to beliefs and bloodties
and desires and comforting habits
Don't listen to them!
They seem to protect,
but they imprison.
They are your worst enemies.
They make you afraid of living in emptiness.
*
Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu
Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion
or cultural system. I am not from the East
or the West, not out of the ocean or up
from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all. I do not exist,
am not an entity in this world or the next,
did not descend from Adam and Eve or any
origin story. My place is placeless, a trace
of the traceless. Neither body or soul.
First, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing being.
*
Your name has been erased
*
Darkness is your candle